2021 Feb 17
The Popularization of Doubt: Scientific Literacy & Alternative Forms of Knowledge in the Soviet Union after World War II
12:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Alexey Golubev, assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston, is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows.
This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in...
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2021 Feb 11
And So On: Reading and Conversation with Kiese Laymon
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Writer Kiese Laymon will explore whether the actual histories of American colleges and universities should be ripe sites for Black American horror and comedic narratives. Laymon will create a live novella and a live essay during this talk, while questioning the ethics of making art “for” an audience longing for both titillation and innocence from the horrific histories of Black Americans in and around American institutions of higher learning.
...
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2020 Dec 04
Art Study Center Seminar at Home: Chinese Gold from the Winthrop Collection
11:00am to 12:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
Since we are unable to welcome you into the museums at this time, we are bringing our experts to you in a new online series, Art Study Center Seminars at Home.
When Grenville Lindall Winthrop left his extensive collection to the Fogg Art Museum in 1943, it contained three gold plaques dating to China’s Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Never displayed to the public, the plaques remained a mystery until recent excavations and archival records shed new light on their origins. In this seminar, curator Sarah Laursen investigates the decoration and function of the gold...
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2020 Dec 03
2020 Visions
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
Too often, the story of women’s suffrage unfolds in a vacuum, seemingly unconnected from the general contours of American history. This panel discussion looks back from the present, asking experts working in a variety of disciplines and organizations to briefly unfold, TED-talk style, a single “big idea” that captures the significance of the 19th Amendment for voting rights, citizenship, and democracy today.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
...
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2020 Dec 02
White Whales, White Males, Whitehead with Lisa Jarnot
5:00pm to 6:30pm
Location: 
Online Event
This lecture, which is part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, explores the doctrine of discovery that haunts American poetry. Lisa Jarnot engages in an autobiographical interrogation of what it means to be a woman in a male-centered experimental tradition, and what it means to have white privilege and write poetry. Several questions arise: What do we keep and what do we reject as we acknowledge the systemic racism and American exceptionalism that pervade even the most benign of bohemian writing communities? Is there something transcendent and healing in the poet’s...
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2020 Dec 02
“Imperfectly Known”: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
In this lecture, author Ira Dworkin will talk about his book in-progress “’Imperfectly Known’: Nicholas Said and the Routes of African American Narrative,” which examines the ways that the intellectual and political culture of Borno, in northeast Nigeria, shaped Black literary culture in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. Focusing on the writings of Said, who came to the United States after his manumission in Europe and who soon thereafter fought in the Civil War, Dworkin’s book broadly considers the relationship of African and Islamic intellectual networks to Black...
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2020 Dec 01
Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War
12:30pm to 2:00pm
Location: 
Online Event
Simon Miles tracks key events in US-Soviet relations in the first half of the 1980s. He argues that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the...
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2020 Oct 29
Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, “A Rage in Harlem”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
This talk will consider the moment when June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller attempted to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots, considered against a larger context of experiments in social housing, environmental planning, urban rebellion, and Afro-futurism.
Learn more about and RSVP for Open House Lecture: Nikil Saval, "A Rage in Harlem."
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2020 Oct 29
Voting, Participation, and Why it Matters
5:00pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Online via Zoom
 
Join Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, Tova Wang, a Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center, Michelle Tassinari, Director and Legal Counsel of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Elections Division, and Eneida Tavares the Interim Commissioner for the City of Boston’s Elections Department for a conversation on the importance of local voter participation, education and civic engagement, and to learn more about what’s at stake for our...
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2020 Oct 29
Education Justice: Why Prison Classrooms Matter
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
“What college does, it helps us learn about the nation,” said Rodney Spivey-Jones, a 2017 Bard College graduate currently incarcerated at Fishkill Correctional Facility in New York, in the docuseries College behind Bars. “It helps us become civic beings. It helps us understand that we have an interest in our community, that our community is a part of us and we are a part of it.”
The Bard Prison Initiative and programs at other institutions of higher learning across the country have brought together teachers and learners in incarcerated spaces for years. This panel will gather...
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2020 Oct 28
The Architecture of Democracy
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
In the week before the U.S. general election, Harvard and MIT will share a public discussion on the role of architecture in a representative democracy. Colleagues and students from across both institutions will join in dialogue on the profession’s role in supporting democratic society, now and in the future.
Panelists participating in this event will be announced in the coming weeks.
Learn more about and RSVP...
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2020 Oct 27
American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
Everett L. Fly believes that African American legacies are embedded in the physical and cultural substance of many of America’s built and vernacular places. Formal education in architecture introduced him to the positive potential of planning and design in respecting and expressing the cultures of people wherever they live, work and play. He believes that American planning and design should be more deliberate in reflecting and respecting a broader cultural diversity, including Black and Indigenous people.
Fly will discuss research, discovery, interpretation and applications of...
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2020 Oct 22
New Blocs, New Maps, New Power
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
By the early 1980s, a new political landscape was taking shape that would fundamentally influence American society and politics in the decades to come. That year, the long-standing effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment—championed by suffragist Alice Paul and introduced to Congress in 1923—ran aground, owing in significant measure to the activism of women who pioneered a new brand of conservatism.
This panel will draw together strands and stories that are often kept separate: the ideas and growing influence of conservative women, the political activism of gay communities...
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2020 Oct 22
National Fossil Day
9:00am to 2:00pm
Location: 
Harvard Museum of Natural History—Online
Celebrate National Fossil Day—a celebration organized by the National Park Service—by taking a closer look at museum fossils with Harvard paleontologists. What can we see on ancient seafloors? How do modern animals help us understand extinct animals? What fossils still amaze scientists? What is it like to be a practicing paleontologist? Bring your curiosity and questions to this online event for all ages!
Learn more about and RSVP for National...
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2020 Oct 15
Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier
7:00pm
Location: 
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian—Online
The first person who will set foot on Mars is alive right now. We believe this, but even if we're wrong we know the first crew to arrive there will look nothing like the ones that landed on the Moon fifty years ago.
Our world has changed for the better, and ASTRONAUTS tells the story of the women who built this better world. The main character and narrator is Mary Cleave, an astronaut you may not have heard of. It's not because so many people have been to space; only a few hundred have! It’s because this graphic novel isn’t about fame. No astronaut you'll ever meet took the...
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2020 Oct 08
The Enduring Legacy of Slavery and Racism in the North
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
Although Massachusetts formally abolished slavery in 1783, the visible and invisible presence of slavery continued in the Commonwealth and throughout New England well into the 19th century. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz’s theory about human origins is but one example of the continued presence and institutionalization of racism in the North.
Taking as a starting point the new book To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, this panel of experts will examine the role and impact of slavery in the North and discuss the influence...
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2020 Oct 08
Loeb Lecture: Edgar Pieterse
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Harvard Graduate School of Design—Online
African cities are confronted by large youthful labour markets with limited prospects of formal industrial employment, on the one hand, and rapid physical expansion without the resources to address the massive infrastructural requirements to support people and economies, on the other. These daunting challenges are compounded by the impacts of the climate crisis and other forms of acute environmental risk. This confluence calls for situated innovations to reimagine and redesign investments in sustainable infrastructures that are simultaneously low-carbon, labour-intensive and geared...
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2020 Oct 03
Amazing Virtual Archaeology Fair at Harvard
1:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: 
Online—Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East
Celebrate the glamour, labor, humor, and discoveries of archaeology at Harvard. Join student archaeologists as they share their experience with an Irish castle, a shaft tomb in western Mexico, monuments on the Giza plateau in Egypt and drones used to study El-Kurru in ancient Nubia, among other locations. Place a friendly wager on an atlatl (spear throwing) demonstration, observe chew marks on bones from the Zooarchaeology Lab and experience a virtual-reality view of the Great Sphinx.
...
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2020 Oct 01
On Account of Sex (1920)
4:00pm
Location: 
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard—Online
The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 did not "give" women the vote. Rather, it established a negative: that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex alone. This session brings together diverse participants who will each illuminate one facet of women’s political history at this key transitional moment. Together, participants will emphasize the radical achievement of the amendment, exploring the full implications of what it meant to remove sex as a barrier to voting, which resulted in the largest-ever one-time expansion of the electorate and mobilized a...
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2020 Sep 22
50th Anniversary of Urban Design Lecture: Alex Krieger, “The American City Prior and (Possibly) Following the Pandemic”
7:30pm to 9:00pm
Location: 
Online Event, Graduate School of Design
 
American instincts oscillate between the allure of the city and that of life free of city stress; between the temptations of the metropolis, and bucolic retreat from those very centers of civic life. Such oscillation, occurring across American history, have on the one hand enabled the building of Manhattan, the ‘Capital of Capitalism’ (and culture, too) and the invention of the ‘garden suburb’ where family grace was to dwell, prior to metastasizing into sprawl.
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